3 wildfire

INTEGRATED TEAM APPROACH

FIRE DETECTIONS AND WARNINGS LIKELY SAVED LIVES IN HISTORIC U.S. WILDFIRES

BY TODD LINDLEY, DREW DAILY, MARK FOX, DOUGLAS SPEHEGER, CHRISTOPHER MASK, LUKE KANCLERZ, AARON WARD, MIKE GITTINGER, ROBYN HEFFERNAN, ZACH TOLBY, MICHAEL PAVOLONIS, AND STEPHEN BIEDA III

On Feb. 26-57, 2024, a historic wildfire outbreak devastated parts of the United States’ southern Great Plains. In all, about 40 wildfires burned an estimated 555,196 hectares, primarily in the Panhandle of Texas and western Oklahoma.

At 428,352 hectares, the Smokehouse Creek fire began in Hutchinson County, Texas, on Feb. 26, and spread eastward more than 135 kilometers into Ellis County, Oklahoma, by the afternoon of Feb. 27. The Smokehouse Creek fire became one of the largest contiguous wildfires in modern U.S. history.

Also igniting on Feb. 26, the Windy Deuce fire destroyed parts of Fritch, Texas, and became a 58,380 hectare megafire.

In all, hundreds of structures were destroyed, and nearly 12,000 head of cattle were reportedly lost. Unfortunately, two Texas residents were killed in the fires. While the loss of human life was tragic, officials believe that an integrated team approach to the provision of fire detections and warnings saved many lives.

“At the community level, the fires that we experienced on [Feb.] 26 and 27 were the most proactively warned fires in U.S. history,” said Mark Goeller, Oklahoma Forestry Services director and state forester.

The Integrated Warning Team (IWT) Fire Warning paradigm was developed and demonstrated in select jurisdictions of Oklahoma and Texas in 2022 and 2023; it allows multi-agency and multi-disciplinary considerations

in real-time decision making that lead to proactive warning dissemination to the public and first responders for wildfires that are an imminent threat to life and property.

Fire warnings have traditionally been disseminated by the National Weather Service (NWS) at the request of local emergency management officials, typically to broadcast logistical information for ongoing evacuations. The IWT Fire Warning approach builds upon the NWS’s use of prototype satellite-based fire detections and leverages the agency’s IWT, which promotes effective messaging and mitigative actions among core partnering agencies for many weather hazards. With numerous local, state, federal, and tribal entities responsible for wildland fire planning, suppression response, and mitigation, wildfire emergencies present a unique opportunity to assimilate these technologies in potentially life-saving collaborative warnings – where multiple agencies efficiently message authoritative fire hazard information with one voice.

Built upon operationally forged interagency relationships with trusted reliance on each entity’s contributing expertise, IWT Fire Warning procedures follow a prescribed workflow.

Firefighters battle the Smokehouse Creek Fire on Feb. 27, 2024. Photo courtesy of Texas A&M Forest Service.
  • First, predicted fire environmental parameters known to support extreme fire behavior, composed of both meteorological data and fuels intelligence, are collaborated among the NWS and its partnering state forestry and emergency management agencies prior to expected fire weather episodes.
  • Meteorologists then utilize National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite technology (GOES-East and GOES-West), as well as other meteorological observing platforms, to monitor the near-fire environment and identify particularly dangerous fires.
  • If, and when, a fire exceeds critical remote sensing thresholds and becomes a candidate for an IWT Fire Warning, NWS meteorologists alert key fire and emergency management personnel with a “Potentially Dangerous Wildfire Detected” hot spot notification.
  • Fire analysts and emergency managers then verify the situation on the ground. In some cases, state forestry agency fire-spread modeling is used to enhance the understanding of potential threats to the public and at-risk values.
  • Once an imminent threat to life and property is confirmed, the agencies request NWS dissemination of geo-targeted fire warnings, which alert both the public and on-site personnel of the danger.

The average IWT coordination period, or the time span from when meteorologists identify a potentially dangerous fire to when collaborated warnings are disseminated, is typically about nine minutes. This is an improvement over the legacy fire warning-practices which, when exercised, were documented to take upwards of 80 minutes to obtain authorized requests from local emergency managers. In many cases, the fog of war that is commonly experienced in emerging incidents contributed to such delays. IWT fire warnings have proven to precondition residents and hasten action if evacuations are ordered and have informed decisions by incident commanders to adopt strategies focused on protection of life and property – especially in circumstances when minutes matter.

For the first time during the historic Feb. 26-27 southern Great Plains firestorm, multiple NWS forecast offices collaborated with fire, land, and emergency management agencies to transmit up to 20 IWT fire warnings. Following the initial successful development and implementation at the NWS forecast office in Norman, Oklahoma, in partnership with Oklahoma Forestry Services in 2022 and 2023, meteorologists at the neighboring NWS forecast office in Amarillo, Texas, completed training and partner outreach toward adoption of IWT Fire Warning practices just one week prior to the outbreak.

Texas A&M Forest Service’s predictive services department head Luke Kanclerz said, “The effort and coordination [among] NWS offices, local and county emergency management, and forestry agencies for fire warnings, I believe, saved lives.”

Kanclerz’s sentiments were substantiated by preliminary analyses of census data in the burned areas, with fatality rates significantly reduced relative to recent similarly destructive wildfires nationwide. While that data is still under review, early estimates are that the successful evacuation of thousands of Texans and Oklahomans from harm’s way by local officials likely prevented much larger losses of life.

Scott Barrett, assistant chief of the volunteer fire department in Gage, Oklahoma, and unified incident commander on the Feb. 27 Catesby fire, which burned 36,295 hectares in Ellis County, Oklahoma, noted “Fire warnings were issued very quickly with Forestry co-ordinating with the National Weather Service while we were conducting the on-the-ground evacuations. Those warnings were updated as the fire progressed. We had no fatalities.”

National Weather Service Norman lead meteorologist Doug Speheger interprets satellite data of a fire using the NGFS. Photo courtesy National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration /National Weather Service.

In the days following the Smokehouse Creek, Windy Deuce, and Catesby fires, meteorologists used enhanced satellite-based fire detection tools to notify first responders of new fires before local 911 calls were received. Dispatch was prompted by an NWS hot spot detection for the 149 fire in Harper County, Oklahoma, on March 2. The meteorologist-generated alert allowed for rapid and heavy initial attack efforts by local and state resources. An Oklahoma Forestry Services generated fire-spread model based on the satellite derived geolocation provided by the NWS indicated potential for the fire to consume approximately 6,000 hectares over the next eight hours in the absence of suppression. Responding firefighters arrived on scene and discovered the fire 20 minutes after initial NWS detection and found the fire burning 610 meters east of the coordinate location reported by NWS meteorologists, who first spotted the fire using the GOES-East satellite some 35,000 kilometers above the equator. The timely precision of an integrated response enabled firefighters to fully contain and extinguish the fire at only 15 hectares, completely mitigating the threat.

 

Mooreland, Oklahoma, Fire Chief Travis Case, commented, “Forestry had the coordinates (satellite detection) from the National Weather Service to me before the fire was even called in.”

At least three fires in Oklahoma that ignited on Feb 27 were discovered through the NWS’s use of satellite based fire detection. Oklahoma Forestry Service’s Fire Management Chief Andy James praised the capability as “absolutely incredible for wildland fire response –detection, dispatch, size-up and warning continuum, increasing incident responder situation awareness and public awareness when time is of the essence.”

The satellite fire detection component of the IWT Fire Warning concept will soon get a boost from new technology being developed at NOAA / National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service. The Next Generation Fire System (NGFS) will automatically alert forecasters at NWS offices when a new fire is detected. This will help to proliferate these emerging capabilities across the country.

Until new tools like the NGFS are fully operational, the IWT Fire Warning paradigm is not yet ready for deployment across the country. Just 10 days before the devastating firestorm struck Texas and Oklahoma in Febuary, NWS director Ken Graham conducted a joint press briefing with Oklahoma Forestry Service’s director Goeller at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma. Touting the early success of IWT fire warnings in Oklahoma, the directors announced a public comment period that gathered critical feedback on the hot spot notification services provided through October 2024.

The NOAA Fire Weather Testbed allows an objective evaluation of new scientific developments and tools so that NOAA can improve support to the nation. The Fire Weather Testbed’s main objective is to bring the fire weather community together to transition advanced technologies and new applications to operational platforms as quickly as possible. In June the Fire Weather Testbed brought together experienced NWS fire forecasters and state forestry partners to evaluate and improve NOAA’s new fire detection capabilities, and to determine how those detections are communicated to partner agencies, as well as how the IWT fire warnings could be implemented across the country.

Both NOAA’s Fire Weather Testbed and NGFS for early fire detection are new initiatives funded through Congress’ historic investments (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) in wildland fire management to advance wildfire prediction, detection, observation, modeling, and forecasting capabilities. Scientific vetting through the multi-disciplined evaluation by professionals from other parts of the country will help to determine how the new warning approach could be implemented outside of Oklahoma and Texas, where it has been so successfully demonstrated. The testbed evaluation this summer helped identify the technological, communication, and partnership challenges that need to be overcome, as well as future research needed to expand use of the NGFS and a cross-agency warning service across the United States for the protection of life and property during wildfire events.

In its recently published NWS Transformation Roadmap, an evolution of services is described where future meteorologists will deliver “high quality, science-based decision support services – telling people what they need to know in order to make life-saving decisions.” That level of service is exactly what Beaver County, Oklahoma emergency manager Keith Shaddon experienced amidst the flames on Feb. 27. “I thought the IWT Fire Warning process worked very well. It provided great assistance in getting the message out to those [who] needed to evacuate and prepare. The whole process provided a great service to our community,” Shaddon said. Through the power of collaboration, emerging technologies are enabling a transition of science to service through integrated wildfire detection and warnings which place NWS meteorologists, along with their partnering fire, land, and emergency management agencies, on the forefront of emergency response.

Todd Lindley is the science and operations officer at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Norman, Oklahoma. He has worked as an operational meteorologist at five NWS offices in Texas and Oklahoma throughout his 28-year career. Lindley specializes in decision support to fire management agencies on the southern Plains. As a founding member of the Southern Great Plains Wildfire Outbreak Working Group, Lindley has authored and/ or co-authored more than 30 publications, reports, and conference manuscripts on fire meteorology. The working group has produced interagency co-ordinated probabilistic wildfire potential products that informs pre-deployment of state resources, developed novel conceptual models in fire weather, and innovative uses of GOES-R era satellite-based fire detection and monitoring. Lindley previously chaired the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s Satellite Data Task Team, and briefly served as his agency’s National Fire Weather Services senior advisor. Lindley was the 2023 recipient of the American Meteorological Society’s Charles L. Mitchell Award for “seminal fire weather forecasting science and innovative applications” and his working group was recently cited by the Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security and Department of Emergency Management’s Oklahoma Whole Community Preparedness Award for “building statewide resilience.”

Drew Daily serves as deputy fire management chief with Oklahoma Forestry Services (operations and preparedness). Within this role, he is responsible for both fire suppression operations and prescribed fire management. Working alongside partners assessing the fire environment is a critical function of Daily’s work for both wildfire readiness and application of objective driven prescribed fire. Daily is part of the Southern Great Plains Wildfire Outbreak Group and Southern Area Fire Environment Group. Additionally, Daily serves as operations section chief on the Northern Rockies Team 1 incident management team.

Mark Fox is the meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Norman, Oklahoma. Fox earned his meteorology degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1989, after growing up fascinated by the weather in north central Oklahoma. Mark has experience across the entire integrated warning team, starting his career working for a private meteorology company in college. He then worked for 10 years as a broadcast meteorologist, mostly in Wichita Falls, Texas, before moving to the National Weather Service in 1999. Since moving to the NWS, Fox has worked in the Fort Worth, Amarillo, and Lubbock offices, and served four years at Southern Region Headquarters as the regional training officer. In 2009, Fox became the warning and coordination meteorologist at WFO Dallas/Fort Worth before serving as the meteorologist-incharge of the Amarillo Weather Forecast office from late 2018 through September 2021.

Doug Speheger has been a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma, for more than 30 years forecasting and studying weather in the Southern Great Plains. Speheger has been involved in research involving fire weather, tornadoes, severe weather, and radar meteorology.

Christopher Mask is an experienced GIS professional with a bachelor of science in cartography. With more than 25 years in the GIS industry, Mask has established himself as a seasoned expert in geographic information systems. Currently serving as a GIS manager at Oklahoma Forestry Services, Mask’s passion lies in leveraging spatial data to solve complex problems and enhance decision-making processes. Christopher’s dedication to his field has been recognized with the prestigious SCAUG Founders Award in 2019.

Luke Kanclerz assumed the role as Texas A&M Forest Service predictive services head in February. Luke has spent his entire 12-year career in wildland fire with the Texas A&M Forest Service, beginning with three years in mitigation and prevention. Kanclerz has spent the last nine years supporting Texas as a fire analyst with predictive services by providing decision support documents and fire environment intelligence to Texas A&M Forest Service fire management and multiple state and federal co-operators. Kanclerz regularly engages in fire suppression across Texas and the United States with multiple operational qualifications including crew boss and heavy equipment boss.

Aaron Ward is the science and operations officer at the NWS Weather Forecast Office in Amarillo, Texas. Ward has worked several high impact fire weather events since joining NWS Amarillo in 2016, and has helped facilitate several changes to the local fire weather program using the latest advancements in science and technology to improve communication, operational readiness, and tactical response. The most recent change has been the most notable – the implementation of the IWT Fire Warning concept just in time for the Feb. 26-27 historic wildfires.

Michael Gittinger is the meteorologist-in charge at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Amarillo, Texas. As MIC and previously as the warning coordination meteorologist (2015-2022), Gittinger has been working closely with fire weather partner agencies in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles to facilitate significant programmatic changes over the past nine years. In total, Gettinger has 25 years’ experience with the National Weather Service.

Robyn Heffernan is the NOAA National Weather Service fire weather services senior advisor at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Heffernan specializes in interagency coordination, strategic planning, and fire environment policy. She serves on several national teams including the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, the White House Wildfire Resilience Interagency Working Group, and is vice chair of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group Fire Environment Committee. Heffernan also oversees new fire weather science and technology transition to operations, as well as fire weather training efforts. Previously, Heffernan worked for the Bureau of Land Management, in the predictive services program, where she assisted in managing the national fire weather program for the federal land management agencies.

Zach Tolby has more than a decade of operational forecasting experience, specializing in mountain meteorology and the fire environment. As an incident meteorologist, he is deployed to major wildfire incidents across the western United States. Recently, Tolby joined NOAA Research as manager and lead scientist at the Fire Weather Testbed in Boulder, Colorado. Tolby oversees the testing and evaluation of new fire weather tools, in close collaboration with the fire weather community, to rapidly transition advanced technologies to operational platforms.

Michael Pavolonis is the NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) Wildland Fire Program manager. Pavolonis earned his PhD in oceanic sciences from the University of Wisconsin – Madison; he also holds a bachelor of science degree in meteorology from Penn State and a masters of science in atmospheric and oceanic sciences from the University of Wisconsin.

Dr. Stephen Bieda III is the NOAA/National Weather Service Severe, Fire, Public, and Winter Weather Services Branch chief at National Weather Service Headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. Bieda plays a pivotal role in defining and co-ordinating the implementation of NOAA and NWS strategic plans while ensuring the execution of the service programs he oversees. Previously, Bieda served as the NWS national science and operations officer and the NWS Amarillo, Texas, science and operations officer. He also serves the American Meteorological Society’s Weather Analysis and Forecasting Committee’s chair and journal editor.